16. The
house on F Street. . .
The house on F Street was a high
white-painted frame thing, gabled and corbelled, soffits rotting where the
gutters leaked. I stood on the columned porch and rang the bell again, holding
my pie-skillet by the handle in one hand, an unopened bottle of Pinot Noir in
the other, clutching a twelve-pack-minus-two under my right arm. When Selva
finally came to the door, she said “Oh, it’s you” in exactly the tone I had
anticipated; she held the screen for me, allowing me to squeeze past, attuned
to the light brush of her breasts against my flight jacket. Once inside, I
found I was at the foot of a grand staircase that had been walled off from the
parlor it had once ornamented.
“Upstairs,” Selva said behind me.
“We’ve got the second floor.” I climbed the ornate stairway, marveling at the
strange mixture of fine old woodwork and shabby remodel. Some fusty dead
Republican judge’s showpiece, the house had been built with twelve-foot
ceilings, so that although it looked tall enough for three stories, there were
two; the attic was uninhabited. The stairway led to a full-length landing that
served as a hallway, lit at the front by an oval window of leaded glass. A door
to my left stood open, and a warm buzz of voices came from within.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” I
said appreciatively, glancing back at the walnut banister and lathe-turned
newel posts. Apartments such as this one promised to be weren’t cheap.
“We like it.”
I entered a large, carpeted living
room with windows on the street. Beyond was another room, nearly as large, and
beyond that was a narrow alley of a kitchen. I made my way through the crowd to
a sideboard in the second room, where dishes of food were arranged; I placed my
offering, my double-wide skillet-baked pie, among them. As I set the heavy
thing down, a tall, angry-looking woman with a thick mane of chestnut-colored
hair strode from the kitchen and relieved me of the wine. “I don’t suppose you
brought a corkscrew,” she said accusingly. When I shrugged in reply, she said,
“Great. We need a corkscrew. Nobody can find a corkscrew.”
Adrian had replaced Selva as my
escort. He showed me where I could put my coat, in a bedroom that had been
fixed up as a den, and pointed out the bathroom, which someone was using. The
size of the rooms was luxurious for a student apartment; I felt sure it was
Adrian who had the money. “Welcome,” he said once my flight jacket was disposed
of. “We didn’t know if you’d come. You said you were going to Palisade to see
your father.”
“Palemon,” I said. “My old man is
pretty busy these days. I probably wouldn’t even get to talk to him until
Sunday.”
“It’s good that you’re here,”
Adrian reiterated. “What does your father do?”
“He’s a trucker,” I said, glancing
around at the drafting table and the roll-top desk, the glass-fronted bookcase.
“What about yours?”
“My father’s family is in the
grocery business,” he said.
“In Boston?”
“Boston,” he said blandly,
“Providence. New Haven. New York, too, at one time, but my uncles had some
problems with the Port Authority.” He led the way back to the kitchen, where he
helped the woman who’d taken my wine to find a corkscrew. He then rejoined his
guests, leaving me alone with her in the narrow kitchen. I watched as she tried
with trembling hands to use the screw, then stepped closer to help her.
“Piss off,” she said with tears in
her eyes. They were the color of a Siamese cat’s eyes, shocking blue. “Can’t
you see I’m busy?”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “My
name’s Jonas Smith.”
The tall woman put down the
corkscrew and offered her hand. Her grip was strong as a dairyman’s. “Sorry,”
she said. “Mattie Halliday. It’s not a good time to talk to me right now.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Do you want
me to open those bottles?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I need
something to do in here.”
The aroma in the kitchen was rich
and sagey, but wrong for Thanksgiving. “What are we having?” I asked Mattie.
“Smells like sausage, not turkey.”
“Meatballs,” she replied. “Adrian’s
making them. Get out of here, will you? You’re trying to cheer me up, and I
don’t want to be reasonable. Here’s a glass.” She slid my unopened wine to the
back of the counter and handed me a tumbler. “There’s box wine in the other
room.”
I took the water glass she handed
me and moved to the kitchen doorway to look over the crowd. Here and there were
plain earnest faces that I’d passed in Andrews Hall, but many of the guests had
a sexier look. The women wore flash and trash like a convention of shoplifters,
while the men, who stood apart, four to a group, were elaborately baggy and
ragged in surplus fatigues. To my horror, I saw my students, Krupp and
Kerrigan, in one of these groups. Krupp, the more alert of the two, looked up
and saw me at the same time; he grinned and waved me over. I could see no
alternative. Other than Selva and Adrian, those two dickheads were the only people
in the room I knew.
“Hello, Professor,” he said when I
came near. “Want some hashish?”
“No!” I said forcefully. I had
nothing against hashish, but I was shocked by his insolence. For one thing, the
bastard knew I was no professor. “What are you two doing here? Didn’t I give
you enough homework?”
“Don’t worry,” Krupp said, winking
slyly. “We’ll both sit down an hour before class and whip out something. Isn’t
that right, Kerry?”
“Hunh?” Kerrigan said. “Say again?”
His ponytail swung behind him as he turned our way, his pupils like wide-angle
lenses at full aperture.
“I told the Professor,” Krupp
repeated as if he were speaking to a deaf man, “that we’d have our papers in on
time.”
“What kind of papers?” Kerrigan
focused in, studying my face. “Oh, hi, Doc,” he said genially, once he was sure
he recognized me.
“I’m not a fucking doctor,” I
snarled, “Ph. D. or any other kind. You both must know you’re flunking, but if
that doesn’t bother you it certainly doesn’t bother me.”
“Easy, Professor,” Krupp said.
“We’re not holding it against you. Do you know these people?” He introduced me
to his other companions, who wanted to shake hands log-rolling-contest style.
They wore peace medallions over their fatigue shirts.
“Pleased to meet you,” I lied. “Are
all of you friends of Selva Andersen’s?” They laughed and shook their heads in
a way that showed they might’ve had aspirations; either they were heterosexual
or else they were good at faking it.
“Mostly we just know Adrian from
the marches,” Krupp explained. “You know? Protests? Have you been at any of
them?”
“No,” I said. “Adrian’s an
organizer, then?”
“He’s big-time,” Krupp said
quietly. “Connections back East. SDS. Heavy
stuff.” Kerrigan nodded wisely. “Their phone is tapped,” Krupp added
significantly. “There’s probably an FBI informant here today.”
“Adrian looks more MBA than he does
SDS,” I said.
Everyone laughed knowingly. “You
should hear him speak,” Krupp said admiringly. “Talk about radical!”
“He can get you moving,” Kerrigan
put in.
“If he can get you moving,” I told him pointedly, “he knows some tricks I don’t.”
Kerrigan gave me the full benefit
of his calf’s gaze. “Man, everything you say is rhetoric,”
he said, pronouncing the word as if it denoted some particularly disgusting
organic substance. “Adrian tells it like it is.”
“But it’s all rhetoric,” I said, turning away hopelessly. On the other side of
the room, Selva and Adrian were standing together. I went over to them. “Nice
wine,” I said. “Who are these people?”
They looked at me evenly, as if I’d
asked them how much their parents made or whether they enjoyed anal sex.
Finally Adrian responded. “The blue-eyed woman in the kitchen—you met her—is
Mattie Halliday, the Unitarian minister. She also works with the Mary Moody
Emerson Center. Over there—” he inclined his smooth forehead toward a
bluff-jawed, sandy-haired man arguing in one corner— “that’s Ted Kemp, the new
chair of the Philosophy Department. The one listening is Jerome Weld, who has
the X-Cell Bookstore. The dark-haired woman by the window, the one with the
martini glass, is from the Lincoln Star, and she’s talking with Steve Barney,
the state legislator from the campus district. The people from the English
Department you know; the rest are Selva’s friends, actors and theater techs.
See anyone you’d like to meet?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Doesn’t
Kemp go with L. D. Langdon? I don’t see her.”
They looked at one another. “She
made other plans,” Selva said. “I saw you talking to Paul and Roger.”
“You mean Krupp and Kerrigan? What
are those two assholes doing here?”
“Maybe they’re just as happy to see
you,” she replied coldly.
I turned to address Adrian. “No
football game?” The mighty Nebraska Cornhuskers played the Oklahoma Sooners
every Thanksgiving, causing a great stir and a lot of money to change hands.
The game was televised nationally.
“Too barbaric,” Selva said. “Like
butchering a large bird in front of guests.” Adrian smiled at her approvingly;
the two of them were making me sick. I noticed that my tumbler was empty.
“Can I get you a wine glass?”
Adrian asked. “There’s plenty in the cabinet.”
“This glass is fine,” I said. “I
brought beer, maybe I’ll switch to that.”
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast,
expecting that the meal would be served at two o’clock. But the afternoon dragged
on, while I wove from group to group, from alien conversation to alien
conversation. I should’ve taken Adrian’s advice and switched glasses, but did
not do so. The effect was predictable. By the time we all sat down to eat, I
had made two more attempts to converse with Selva Andersen, which were
rebuffed; I had angered the Lincoln Star journalist, who called me a sexist
asshole, and I had flirted with one of the slinky theater types, only to
discover that I was talking to a man. On the plus side, I’d struck up an
acquaintance with the Halliday woman, who seemed to regard me as some sort of
ally. I was drunk and getting drunker, and the evening was frighteningly young.
Italian meatballs, it turned out,
were Adrian’s specialty. Made according to an old family recipe, they were the
size of weighty tennis balls, dense and sweetly delicious, served with pasta in
a sinus-clearing sauce. He’d also roasted peppers of a kind I hadn’t seen
before, red and shaped like chiles but very mild. The remaining condiments were
mostly traditional Thanksgiving stuff with a little extra twist. It was a meal
to make you sorry for the humble pilgrims. Once we’d done as much damage to the
food as possible, a round of toasting began; we toasted Columbus and Marco
Polo, Pocahontas and Squanto. Ted Kemp stood up and tapped his glass with a
knife. “A toast to Adrian Fisher,” he announced. “Though our hearts grow weary
and our minds grow dim, when meatballs are mentioned we’ll think of him.”
“Hear, hear!” went around the table, and Selva Andersen lifted her glass and
shouted, “Adrian’s balls!”
Everyone laughed uproariously
except for me and for Mattie Halliday, who stared at Ted Kemp with a pale,
fixed expression. The next person who stood up was the journalist. She looked
me in the eye, raised her glass, and said, “Here’s to the happy pig. He lives a
life of sloth and ease in mud and shit up to his knees; he drinks and eats and
ne’er complains, till the women make sausage of his brains.” Female voices
cried, “Hear, hear!” while the hot blood rushed upward in my neck and I pushed
back my chair and rose swaying to my feet.
I lifted my tumbler and looked out
over the crowd. “Here’s to the Vietnam War,” I said. “It’s stupid, it’s
hopeless, it’s brutal, it’s ugly, it’s mean, it’s evil, it’s a putrid rotten
festering little plantar’s wart of a war, but it’s the only one we’ve got.” Not
a glass was raised. I took a long draught of wine and added, “Does anyone at
this table want to fight?”
Fortunately, I passed out before
anyone could answer me.
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